When a king dies under mysterious circumstances, an eclectic assortment of dynastic families use politics, war and ancient magic to make their claim to his throne — all while a much more nefarious threat prepares to descend upon them.

Watch ... to see the most successful screen translation of a great fantasy novel. Author George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” is too sprawling and too intricate to have been handled properly as a movie. HBO and writer-producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss do justice to it as TV, using stunning locations, eye-popping special effects, and a cast drawn from the best of European theater and television (with one American ringer, the charismatic Peter Dinklage). “Game of Thrones” is so absorbing that even viewers with no interest in swords, dragons or prophecies get sucked into its storytelling. The show always focuses on the characters and dialogue first, before it trots out all the high fantasy.

Skip ... if you’re bothered by plots driven by sexual assault. Early in the show’s run, critics complained that Benioff and Weiss gratuitously stuck naked bodies into the background to keep the audience’s interest, so when the show’s sex scenes began taking a turn for the violent, it was harder for the producers to dispute the charge that they meant to titillate. True to the book or not, the show’s reliance on rape as “action” can seem like a cheap shock effect.

How To Watch It

This is an epic saga, designed to be seen and heard in full, especially because there are so many characters (so many!) whose relationships to other characters are best discerned by watching from the beginning. But for those who want to sample before committing, “Game of Thrones” has produced a couple of episodes over the years that mostly stick with just a handful of characters in one location, and could be watched as standalones. Season 2’s “Blackwater” and Season 4’s “The Watchers on the Wall” offer large-scale battles, real human drama, stirring heroism and unexpected twists, which are all the qualities that have made this series an international phenomenon.